Michael Daly:  

I am not on this site much, but decided what the heck if anyone is interested, I’d share something about the last 40+ years of Mike Daly’s life. Most importantly to these days I think the greatest accomplishment is I have been married to the same girl I met in college since 1982, we raised two sons who are now both adult men and we recently added our first grandson. Back in HS most people had no idea my Dad was seriously ill our senior year, and he ended up dying suddenly about two weeks before we graduated in June 1977. That whole final year of HS was and still is a blur for me. Was never a great student anyway and we had just moved to Toms River before I started Freshman year so honestly I hardly knew anyone and was really wishing I could move back to Arizona, but even with all that I managed to graduate. When we first moved to Toms River we lived in the Silver Ridge section for a year but ended up in Pine Beach across from the old Admiral Farragut Academy. My Mom stayed in Pine Beach after my Dad passed away in 1977, herself passing away in 2004. I had started attending OCC part time at night during our senior year (otherwise I had threatened to drop out if the school refused to let me), and really did well in college classes. After HS graduation I stayed local and attended Ocean County College full time for two years, I found out I really enjoyed college and excelled where generally I had just hated HS. I started to become a good student finally at OCC and even got involved in a bunch of extra curricular activities such as Student Government, the Student Center Board, college radio WOCC, and Circle K which was a college program sponsored by Kiwanis. My second year at OCC I was elected as a NJ Circle K Lieutenant Governor for one of the Divisions in New Jersey and received some state Circle K awards for the volunteer work I was involved in locally in Toms River. After graduation from OCC in 1979 I transferred to Montclair State and graduated from there in 1981. I met my future wife at OCC and we started dating steady in 1979, and were married in 1982. Years later I attended Norwich University and in 2005 received a Masters of Science cum laude in Information Assurance and Cyber Security. What was cool was being invited back to actually be a college professor in that program for a semester or two and I even helped them revise the program content since anything technical is constantly changing. I had attended Marine Corps Officer’s Candidate School that summer after I graduated from OCC in 1979 and again between my Junior and Senior years of 1980 at Montclair what was called the Platoon Leaders Class (Jr/Sr) (the program dates from WWII and is set up exactly that way so people are tempted to DOR or Drop On Request, just like the movie). MY first summer we started with over 80 candidates and graduated 37. But I made it through both summers and subsequently upon graduation from Montclair State I was offered a commission as an Officer of Marines which I accepted in 1981. Initially I was a Communications Electronics Officer and after completing MOS school I was off to 3rd Force Service Support Group Camp Kinser Okinawa Japan in something called Communications Company that was basically a small battalion. My Wire Platoon had over 70 Marines and my Radio Platoon had 155 Marines spread out from Korea to Hawaii. I got all the typical junior officer assignments in communications as a Comm Watch Officer, Wire Platoon Ldr, Radio Platoon Ldr and ended up as the acting Operations Officer for the company. I was hoping to go to Camp Lejeune and 8th Marines next but instead I was selected as a Series Officer and assigned to 1st Recruit Training Battalion Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island and we moved from Okinawa to Beaufort South Carolina. They kept saying this was a career enhancing tour which at the time I was not happy about being stateside, I wanted to go back overseas At the time we were just starting the peace keeping mission in Beirut and those units were from 8th Marines; I wanted to go and do for real what I had trained to do. But instead I ended up on the drill field in A Company 1st Battalion overseeing at any given time 13 Marine Drill Instructors and up to 240 recruits. My job was make sure we conducted training as safely but as realistically as possible. I decided to leave active duty in 1984 despite efforts from a lot of people around me trying to convince me to stay in. Eventually when it was clear I was leaving I transitioned away from the drill field to the Recruit Administration Center where I was the Assistant Director in charge of Service Record Books, Discharges, and Investigating Recruiter Fraud cases for the Eastern part of the US. I learned there I also had a knack for JAG investigations, and the JAG office on the Depot started assigning me as an investigating officer every chance they could, I was really good at it and I admit I liked being an investigating officer. Regrettably I had had a chance to attend Law school after OCC and had been accepted into the law program down at North Georgia (also a military college that commissioned officers) and a chance to enter the Marine Corps as a commissioned officer lawyer and a JAG just a year or two delayed, for some reason at the time the idea totally did not appeal to me so I turned it down. Today it’s a rare regret. When I separated from the Marines, I returned to Ocean County and stayed in the Marine reserves for a number of years as an Infantry Platoon Leader and then Field Artillery Officer as a Forward Observer and cross trained as a Naval Gunfire Liaison and Forward Air Controller in two of the local Marine Reserve units in New Jersey. I was honorably discharged in 1993. We bought our home in Bayville in 1985 and have been here ever since. Both my sons graduated from Central Regional, my oldest is a registered nurse and married with a son of his own now and my youngest just finished his undergrad degree in Homeland Security and is thinking of moving into Cyber Security. While in the Marines I got introduced to the fine “gentleman’s” game of rugby which instantly became my favorite sport to play, one of those things where the strange mix of finesse, strategy, speed and physical violence just clicked and I played on and off for several years, including a year I played for Princeton Athletic until I hurt my back unrelated to rugby. Being a big guy I started in the scrum as a "prop", then second line as a "lock", then one day someone noticed I could run FAST and I ended up playing wing and running over guys way smaller then me. It was a lot of fun. I miss rugby to this day and especially regret never having had the chance to play the more wide open 7’s version of rugby. I also played quite a bit of soccer in those days and managed to become an F and then E level licensed soccer coach for youth soccer and kept playing soccer myself until I blew my knee out in a charity tournament in my late 30’s. Although I did not wrestle at all in HS, I did get into martial arts after HS and when my sons got into youth wrestling I was offered the chance to coach since some of what I learned in martial arts did translate over “loosely”. I even got to coach HS wrestling myself as an assistant one year at Allentown HS in Upper Freehold which was quite the experience since that team actually experienced a lot of success, even qualifying for the Shore Conference tournament, and as a team wrestled for a sectional state title. I found from the Marine Corps I had a natural knack for all things electronics and these (in the 1980s) new fangled things called Personal Computers which set me on a career path I never had seen for myself in HS. I also found my way back to Fort Monmouth (where I was born BTW, I was an Army brat first) as a contractor supporting a couple of development programs such as SINCGARS and EPLRS and worked at Fort Monmouth for about 11 years working in Logistics, Material Fielding, Test and Evaluation and did just about anything you can do as a defense contractor including manage a couple of contracts and a couple of proposal effo...Expand for more